Mobile communication devices are ubiquitous for business and personal use. Handheld mobile communication devices, sometimes referred to as mobile stations, are essentially portable computers having wireless capability, and come in various forms. These include Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), cellular phones and smart phones. While their reduced size is an advantage to portability, bandwidth and processing constraints of such devices present challenges to the downloading and viewing of email attachments, such as word processing documents, audio files, tables and images. In particular, downloading large attachments consumes significant over-the-air (OTA) bandwidth and battery power on the mobile device. Further, downloading large attachment may also lead to increased bandwidth consumption which inherently increase usage costs.
These challenges extend to the manipulation of email attachments from mobile communication devices. For example, there is no simple mechanism, using prior art attachment service technology, for a user who is one of several recipients in a distribution list of an email that includes an attachment, to do such things as (i) reply to the sender and all recipients while adding a further recipient who is not part of the distribution list and including the attachment in the reply to the further recipient without natively downloading the attachment, (ii) privately forward the attachment to the further recipient, or (iii) send a new email to the further recipient that includes the attachment but not the original email thread from the original sender to the distribution list.
Windows Mobile® software is capable of natively storing attachments on a mobile communication device, wherefrom email messages may be composed including the saved attachment. However, as discussed above, downloading of attachments to the mobile device consumes significant OTA bandwidth and battery power on the mobile device.
Also known in the art are the LEMONADE extensions to the existing IMAP and SMTP protocols, established as an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Open Standard (RFC 4550, dated June 2006), which enable a mobile device email client to forward a message having an attachment to a third party without first downloading the attachment to the mobile device. This is accomplished using a one-time access cookie (URL) provided to the email client by the IMAP server and then forwarded by the email client to the SMTP server which then fetches the message using the cookie directly from the IMAP server and forwards the message to the new recipient.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,256,666 (IBM) discloses a mobile communication device that includes remote software agent to detach an email attachment to a particular path on a file system on behalf of a mobile user. However, the mobile communication device of U.S. Pat. No. 6,256,666 must create a special email message, referred to as Attachment Control Messages (ACM) that incorporates a unique subject line (i.e. “ACM header”), for encapsulating instructions from the device to a server. Further, the device of U.S. Pat. No. 6,256,666 is capable only of facilitating delete/detach/launch functions, but does not copy, paste or buffer the attachment within the server for subsequent manipulations within the email system
The Open Mobile Alliance has defined a further functionality (see OMA-RD-MobileEmail-V1—0-20050929-D) that is similar to the LEMONADE extensions discussed above, that permits forwarding of email without downloading of attachments to the mobile communication device.
It is not known from the foregoing prior art how to manipulate files in a file server system within an enterprise from a remote mobile communication device such that the files may be buffered within the file server system, without resorting to generation of encapsulated control messages and the use of ad hoc message generation protocols as in U.S. Pat. No. 6,256,666. More particularly, it is not known how to reply from a mobile communication device to a sender and all recipients in a distribution list while adding a further recipient who is not part of the distribution list and including the attachment in the reply to the further recipient, or privately forward the attachment to the further recipient, or send a new email to the further recipient that includes the attachment but not the original email thread from the original sender to the distribution list.